


On the Potter's Wheel

by TiamatsChild



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Arthurian Mythology & Adaptations - All Media Types
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:14:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiamatsChild/pseuds/TiamatsChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galahad isn’t stupid. He knows he isn’t any holier than anybody else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Potter's Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> Drawn from an incident in the Vulgate cycle.

“Take this from me,” Galahad begged, sprawled on his back beneath an apple tree while his horse grazed a little ways further out. He’d named her Etheldreda: it seemed to him the saint would understand, and she was such a fine, sturdy, good mare, if like all mares a bit tricky to handle. “Take this from me, God, take it _please_ -” 

Melias would never ride with him again. He could hardly go questing, wounded as he was, but he would never want to go with Galahad again, that was a certainty, and it hurt, it hurt, it hurt almost as badly as when his mother had stopped visiting him on the Feast of Stephen, and he knew it was because he hadn’t been enough for her, hadn’t been enough to heal the ache in her soul. 

It wasn’t his fault. He knew that. A person couldn’t be enough for another person just by trying to be, and no one could live on just one person’s love, especially if they only saw that person on the Feast of Stephen. He hadn’t done anything to hurt Melias, either, only the monk had taken him into the room where Melias lay, and told him how to do the bandaging, and Galahad hadn’t said he knew already, because he worked down in the infirmary, sometimes, at the abbey. At home. The monk had scolded Melias, and Galahad hadn’t said anything then, either, and he ought to have, he ought to have, it wasn’t right to scold a brother in front of other people, but his words had stopped up and he had said nothing.

What the monk had said was true enough. It _was_ dangerous to be greedy (had Melias been greedy? Galahad had only seen him hurt), and it was dangerous to be overconfident (the evidence did suggest that Melias had been that), and it was dangerous to want anything before you wanted God, because then you would get confused and blunder about, because how could you hear God if you were listening to other voices first? But the monk hadn’t said why. He’d just said it was bad.

Galahad had finished bandaging, and he’d said, “I’ll come back,” to Melias, low, and got up to go, but the monk had taken him by the arm and told him how good he was, how he was everything Melias wasn’t, and it hadn’t made Galahad feel good at all. It had made his blood loud in his ears, and his chest too tight, and he’d felt like the floor wasn’t there anymore and he was falling. 

“What, lad?” the monk had said, “You’re white as salt! Go out into the air, go on.”

So Galahad had gone, and he could hear the monk’s voice still, though he didn’t know how, with all the noise his heart was making. 

He’d gone back, finally, when the monk had done, but it was too late, he should have spoken, said something, done something, anything other than stand there and listen to his own heartbeat. Melias had turned his face away from him, and would not look at Galahad at all, not even when Galahad asked if he might do anything to ease the pain of Melias’ wound.

He had spoilt it. It had not been his fault about his mother, he knew that, but it was his own fault about Melias. He had gone all wrong. He should have said something then.

Galahad turned over, burying his face in the chamomile that grew under the apple tree, and breathed deep. It did not make him feel better. He had been told that he was very good indeed, but it only made him feel sick. He had been used to shame someone, and though he did not understand this in any way fully, he felt it powerfully, and he was as ashamed as Melias.

“Please, God,” he said, and started to cry, “Please God, I want to go home, please.”

He was getting salt all over the chamomile. He rolled back over and put his arm over his eyes so he’d get it on his sleeve instead.

Galahad did not know how to not start crying. He had always cried, quite freely, at everything that hurt him, and because he always did so silently, and was always careful not to stain any parchment with his tears, no one much cared. As far as Galahad knew, what you did with a crying fit was ride it out, wait until your tears had washed away the poison of whatever had stung your heart. 

“Please, God,” Galahad said, fainter now, “Please take this from me. I will do anything for you, but this hurts so much.”

He wanted to be home. He wanted the yard’s cool flagstones. He wanted the hayfield. He wanted the vegetable gardens and the herb gardens and the kitchen with the fireplaces you could roast three oxen in: not that they ever did, because the abbey occasionally had fish but mostly subsisted on bread and vegetables and eggs and ale. He wanted the wood lot, and the stream that ran the miller’s wheel. He wanted the airy, bright scriptorium, and the chapel with the stillness that shivered down into the depths of Galahad’s bones even when it was full of voices praising God, even then it was so still there that it was like a physical force. He wanted his little pallet, his accustomed place at table, the general friendly tolerance afforded him in a place where he was odd, but not too far out of the common way. 

“Please God,” he said, and thought of the sunrise, sunset, stopping to look at the full moon in a blue sky, and he cried, because he was Melias’ brother, he wasn’t special, except that God had urged him out of the abbey and God had told a lot of people rather more about it than God had told Galahad, and Galahad didn’t care about who was the best knight in the world, except that it would have made Melias happy to be so. Galahad wasn’t better or more virtuous or pure or braver than Melias. He was just a person, like everybody else a sinner, and he was Melias’ brother because Christ had made them so, and he hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but he had, and if he were any of the things that monk had said, he’d have known how to settle Melias’ hurt, how to take away the ugly things and leave the ones Melias needed to hear.

He didn’t know how to do that. 

“Please God,” Galahad said, eventually, when he’d gone quite limp with crying and spent all his tears. “Please let this pass from me. Let me go home. But,” he took a deep, shuddering breath, and imagined himself broken, melted down, smashed into dust and remade like a pot, so that he would mean what he meant to say next with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind, “But not my will, but your will be done.”

It was warm under the apple tree, and Galahad’s eyes ached, so he shut them. He couldn’t stay awake for much longer, he was sure, he felt heavy and calm, and though the pain wasn’t gone it had ebbed to something bearable, something that would let him rest. He hadn’t quite meant it when he said, ‘not my will’, not quite, not all the way, there was something in him that still held back, still wanted the abbey at any cost. But he was sure he would mean it, by and by. God would grant him that, in time. He was sure. He was sure.

Exhausted, he slept.


End file.
